Seven years ago, I asked Bruce Springsteen what he meant when he talked of the covenant between himself and his audience. It was a long, thoughtful and thorough answer, and when I transcribed it, I realised he would have won Just a Minute, so clear was his reply. Part of what he said was this: ‘I have built up the skills to be able to provide, under the right conditions, a certain transcendent evening, hopefully an evening you’ll remember when you go home. Not that you’ll just remember it was a good concert, but you’ll remember the possibilities the evening laid out in front of you, as far as where you could take your life, or how you’re thinking about your friends, or your wife, or your girlfriend, or your best pal, or your job, your work, what you want to do with your life.’

I’ve felt transcendence a bunch of times at Springsteen shows in the past, but it was only after my third taste of his current tour, in the rain on Saturday night, that I experienced that same intensity again.

What an intoxicating thing it was: a rush of euphoria and intimacy, felt even within a crowd that stretched way up from Hyde Park Corner to Marble Arch. It was the most joyous show you could imagine about death, ageing and trying to hold on to the light as the darkness draws in. It was that joyousness that had confused me on the first two visits (I went to both Hyde Park shows and to Birmingham a few weeks back). Here I finally understood what he was trying to say. That it was time to let go of the E Street Band – time for us, certainly, and perhaps for him, too – because death has been calling for some time, and the calls are only going to get more frequent.

Death wasn’t just a passing reference (every review has noted the acoustic performance of ‘Last Man Standing’, written when Springsteen realised every other member of his high school band was dead), it was present throughout. It was there in ‘Backstreets’, with its spoken section about his friend Terry Magovern, who died in 2007. It was in the pairing of 1984’s ‘No Surrender’, looking back at the promise of youth (‘We learned more from a three-minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school’), with 2020’s ‘Ghosts’, where, memorialising a lost musical buddy, he finds reason to celebrate: ‘I’m alive, and I’m out here on my own.’

It was a night of ghosts. His cover version of the Commodores’ ‘Nightshift’ was a song about dead soul singers. ‘Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out’, as ever, had the big-screen tributes to Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici, both long gone now. And to finish, back to his acoustic guitar and another requiem, ‘I’ll See You in My Dreams’. The very oldest songs of the night, ‘Kitty’s Back’ and ‘The E Street Shuffle’, seemed to be his way of letting the very idea of the E Street Band slip away. (Besides Springsteen, bassist Garry Tallent was the only one of the 19 musicians on stage to have played on those records – a reminder that the group has aged beyond recognition.)

The whole spectacle was like an upscaled, more improvisational version of his Broadway show. That time the notion was: ‘Here is the story of my life.’ This time it was: ‘Here is the story of my band, because I really don’t think you’ll be seeing us any time soon.’ And the slightly dissatisfying setlist – ‘The River’ and ‘Thunder Road’ were dropped from Saturday’s show – made sense. The night was about the totality: it was not just about the songs. It was about the band and the songs and Bruce, still the most magnetic performer imaginable.

Saturday’s wild, desperate delivery of ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’ was one of the greatest individual performances I can remember – a moment of complete emotional devastation. Yet through it all – through this catalogue of pain – Springsteen summoned ecstasy with every holler, every wave, every interaction. In the midst of death there is life.